I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Storm watch

Just a quickie.

On the Atlantic Ocean coast of the U.S., we get a lot of tropical storms and hurricanes. The U.S. Coast Guard maintains a series of Coastal Warning Display stations to warn people of their on-coming approach. There are two types of messages: "watches", indicating a storm might hit a particular patch of coast-line, and "warnings" which indicate that the storm almost certainly will hit that particular patch. And there are four levels of messages: small craft advisories, gale warnings, tropical storm warnings, and hurricane warnings.

At this time, I'd like to issue a Tropical Storm Watch for all high-sec incursions, courtesy of this post on the EVE-O forums from my old friend CCP Greyscale:

Hi everyone,

We're in the process of scheduling some developer time to review the Incursion content, and make adjustments as needed. We've got a stack of feedback from the CSM, and we'll hopefully be blogging about it in the near future.

Thanks,
-Greyscale

We all know how Greyscale likes to "adjust" things after getting input from a CSM, right? I don't need to cover this again?

I'd also point out that for the second time, the CSM seems to be opining on something that the bulk of them know little or nothing about, something that I thought Mittens said they weren't going to be doing. I don't recall seeing any of the CSM in incursion fleets. There are probably a lot of Goons jump-cloning out of null-sec to run high-sec incursions and therefore not available for invasions in Branch and Tenal, though. I suspect that has nothing at all with the CSM's input on the matter.

Those of you who were bitching at me for my thoughtful, measured adjustment of high-sec incursions might soon be dreaming about the day that something that minor was all that was in the weeds. ;-)

I may also have to have myself a good laugh if "Greyscale's CSM6" (null-sec members motivated by the potential loss of jump bridges) were pushed out by "Greyscale's CSM7" (high-sec bears motivated by the massive nerfing of high-sec incursions). There are, after all, a hell of a lot more high-sec bears than there are pilots in null-sec.

I ran Incursions for a couple weeks when they first came out. Draco (who is one of the quieter CSM6 members) has also been running them for the last month or so. We are not completely uninformed.

Highsec incursions make too much ISK. If it were up to me, more of the reward would be shifted to LP, and I would add a gradual decay to those LP, so that there is an incentive to finish an Incursion quickly, not farm it for a week.

Two Step is right. His idea about decaying LP over the life of an Incursion is a good one. There should be incentive to shut down an invasion as quickly as possible, not farm it for as long as possible.

I think you may be overreacting Jester. For one thing any change on this scale is going to be going through a lot more than just one person. Anything Greyscale works on at the scale of incursion balance will also be worked on by Masterplan, Frellicus, Bettik and Affinity at the very least (his teammates).

Also the idea that Mittens would want to nerf incursions for drawing people away from his fleets is pretty silly. You either can motivate people to show up or you can't; what alternatives they have in highsec will have little to no effect on participation. And the CFC has no issue motivating people to show up in the past several months.

@S.W. / Raivi: Greyscale has repeatedly shown that he has no sense of proportion when it comes to his "adjustments". It's a fine irony: a guy whose CCP handle is "Greyscale" has no sense of shades of grey. Everything with him is either overbuff, or overnerf.

I can see his reasoning, tho:"We have a bazillion of things to tweak and adjust, so we take the top one and make sure it doesn't appear at the top of the list anytime soon".

Naturally, that implies that the "adjustment" must be "significant". If an entire community dies as a result of this (and this this context could be either the ppl that moved to 0.0 with Dominion or the Incursion runners) that is just an unfortunate/unintended consequence.

The so famously risk averse bears kill the Mothership when the incursion enters the withdrawing stage. If they keep farming while the incursion withdraws they risk losing the mothership and all the loyalty points. If you want to limit farming, you only need to decrease the time it takes for an incursion to get to the withdrawing stage. Decaying loyalty point rewards are needlessly complicated when you can simply shorten the duration of the incursion.

Focusing on isk is also a mistake because you are trying to balance incursions versus all other profitable aspects in the game. This is a very hard task. An easier solution would be to change incursions so they reward the player with goods instead of isk. These goods would be sold on the market and either be useable themselves or used in the production of mods and or ships. It even makes sense story wise. Sansha is supposed to be an insane genius so his ships would be chock full of useful salvage. The reasons to favor goods is that the reward is dependent upon the market. Think of this like the price of tritanium, when the price goes up, more people mine veldspar, when the price falls, fewer people mine. You want to link the intensity of the activity with the rewards of the activity. The value of the lp rewards are the only thing that vary with the number of people running incursions. I am only guessing that +6% implants have been falling in price as people have cashed in their Concord LP for resale. To the extent that people are concerned with inflation, changing the ration of rewards to more heavily favor goods helps to ameliorate that concern.

Just wondering if there is a way to "adjust" incursions so that less well-organized and pimped players have a chance. I mean, 5man pickup groups or small corps. It seems odd to me that incursions created an entirely different player demographic rather than being something that people do when there is one locally available to fight the boredom of missions or mining.

Seriously by and large incursions work, why not leave them alone and fix stuff that doesn't work? CCPs ability to focus of stuff that's 90% fine is analogous to mowing your lawn whilst your house burns down.

Fredthecabbage: as far as the nullsec CSM is concerned, their house *is* burning down: incursions and Skyrim are stopping their minions from logging in and attending CTAs. Mittens has taken part in some incursion activity, so now of course he feels entitled to call himself an expert on the matter.

I for one welcome these coming changes. Tin foil hat theory's aside incursions do need some nerfs and changes. I just hope CCP Greyscale continues the trend the rest of the company has started and uses the scalpel not the sledge hammer.

Shifting more of the rewards away from isk and more towards LP is a good idea in theory but there's actually not all that much to buy from concord. The 2, 4 and 6% hardwire implants are woeful expensive for what they do and the capital BPC's are of questinable value as well.

That said, if this also means that all the incursion sites from vanguards to HQ's get a pass then bring it on. VG's -are- too easy and HQ's -are- too annoying. Hell, 2 out of 3 HQ sites are eventually a POS bash.And even if this is just all bad for incursioners at least with Greyscale "at the helm" the whiners might turn their attention to something else. Like the DED shield hardeners.

I agree with this. Changing ISK for more LP is not much of a solution, particularly for the newer players that are being drawn into incursions. As tag prices go up, the general use of incursion LP is getting more and more useless, and there's nothing that most players can do with the CONCORD LP items, even assuming they have the massive ISK to buy them.

I could agree with making Vanguards less blitzable, which is another of the solutions I've seen. You really shouldn't be able to clear an OTA by killing only 4 ships.

Also NCOs can be "blitzed" by an Armor Legion Fleet reliably in under 3 mins which is about the same as a Shiny Shield fleet Blitzes OTAs. So only having to kill 3 ships isn't really the problem.

Also I have to ask what an acceptable isk/hr for VGs would be? From what I've seen these 100 mil/hour fleets that I run with are usually very well organized with 15+ in fleet usually (1-2 offgrid boosters, 11 on grid, 3+ people on waitlists, yes people waitlist its not like there is massive amounts of VG sites that everyone can magically find these awesome fleets). Also recently, as in yesterday and today, I was running with one of these very shiny fleets and with all the competitions and sites that were already taken, it struggled to make over 100mil/hr (this was a 2 logi, 9 dps blitz fleet).

God I hate you incursion haters and wish you all die of cancer :DI can run incursions for a week and then PvP for a month with what ISK I farmed. With incursion nerf it will be 2 weeks PvE 2 weeks PvP, and I hate PvE, so if you cant die of cancer do please consider blowing you computer up :)

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